“I will have to wait until tomorrow night now.” He stepped closer and angled his head to see her drawing.
“It is just that still life there. Not complicated, but form is form, and there is no such thing as enough practice.”
“I expect that is true.”
He hovered at her shoulder, watching her. She felt him there right behind her chair. His warmth, his energy—while he escorted her around town, there were others with them, diluting his effect somewhat, but at least distracting her from it. Now, in the silence she felt the air grow heavy with unspoken words and unacknowledged desire. She wondered if he felt it as well.
Perhaps it was different for him here in London where he was in his element. He had many friends here. They greeted him in the park and about town. Men stopped to chat and women smiled from a distance. His charm opened many doors, even for her. She doubted every visitor to London toured an earl’s fine art collection, or paged through a marquess’s priceless illuminated manuscripts.
She strove to concentrate on her drawing, but his proximity tormented her. “I do not think I thanked you for the gown.”
“It is not from me.”
“I only accepted it because of you. It was very exciting, having a gown made and being told not to count the cost. It was kind of you to do all of this for me.”
“I will enjoy seeing you in it, Eva, and only regret the gift could not be mine.”
Because that would imply things, even though they both knew there was nothing to imply now. What a muddle society’s rules made of things.
She set down her crayon and closed her sketchbook. She could not bear sitting here like this, with him so close.
He indeed stepped away from her.
“There is still time for a turn in the park, I think.” He went to her chamber door. “Would you like to join me?”
“Don’t.” The words emerged without thought. “Please, don’t leave.”
He gazed down on his hand, gripping the door’s latch. “You have me at a disadvantage, Eva.”
“I know. But I do not want you to leave. Then I will be here alone, thinking, remembering . . . ” She stood and put down her book and crayon on her chair.
“What do you want from me?” He sounded exasperated.
“I am not sure. But I do not want to walk with you with all those people about. I am always sharing you now. We have had little time together, the way we did in Langdon’s End.”
He faced her. “We were lovers then. This is how it is when you are friends. You often see each other in the company of other friends.”
She went over to him. “Must it be that way? Can’t we have time such as we did in the garden last week? My time is poorer when you are gone, and only half-joyous when there are others with us.”
“Poorer? Poorer?” He strode into the chamber. “Eva, you demanded a promise from me, and I have kept it. However, I am a madman when I am with you. Can you even imagine what hell this has been? I do not just miss your company, damn it. I hunger for you. I walk around insane with lust while I play the visitor’s guide and the good neighbor. So do not ask me to attend on you in private and provide amusement so your time is not poorer.”
“I do not need amusement. I don’t. I need—” She reached out and placed her palm on his chest. Warmth. She needed warmth. She closed her eyes and savored the connection under her hand.
“Eva, you are in grave danger of being ravished, and honor be damned. Remove your hand and step back.”
She opened her eyes and looked at her hand. “I cannot remove it. It is stuck.” She moved it across his chest, under his coat. “Oh, look. It can move. Not totally stuck. Just too heavy to lift, I suppose.” She caressed up, over his shoulder, feeling all the bones and muscles that gave it such an appealing form.
He suffered it, showing more stoicism than she wanted. What happened to honor be damned? She stepped closer, so his scent filled her head. Her lips hovered an inch from his chin, tantalizing him. She smoothed her hand down between them lower yet. His stomach tensed when she passed over it. His erection brushed the back of her hand. She closed her fingers around it through his trousers.
“Damnation, Eva.” His fingers stretched through her hair, holding her head against his chest. He turned her head so her face angled up. He claimed her with a kiss full of the hunger he spoke of. He throbbed in her hand, getting larger and harder. She embraced him with her other arm, and skimmed her fingertips down until they traced the hard swell of his bum.
Her arousal spun through her hotly, colored with the contentment of returning to a familiar place. Once again. There can be little harm in that.
Their bodies entwined, joined by reckless passion and desperate kisses and grasping embraces. She wanted more. More closeness. She pulled his coat down and he shrugged it off. Her own garments annoyed her. She wanted him totally touching her, his skin on hers and his body overwhelming her. She broke an arm free to try and reach back to unfasten her dress.
“There is no time.” He pushed her so she fell onto the bed. He knelt beside it and lifted her skirt and chemise. “Come here. Closer.”
She knew what he intended. “No.”
“Yes.”
“I will scream.”
“Cover your mouth.” He moved her himself, lifting her hips and shifting them to the bed’s edge.
She did not resist. She did not want to. She parted her knees and waited breathlessly for the first kiss. All of her waited—urging, yearning, throbbing. When it came, she groaned with relief, then with astonishment at how the sensations destroyed all sense. Again she moaned. It turned into a begging cry. With her last bit of sanity she pressed her palm against her mouth.
She made no noises to be heard after that. They stayed inside her. Making her frantic. The pleasure built and built, and her eyes teared from the intensity. The scream of her release also remained inside her, multiplying its effect, lengthening the exquisite pitch of delirium.
She reclaimed the world and opened her eyes. Gareth stood in front of her, hot-eyed, aroused, overwhelming her with the power of his sex. She pushed herself up and reached to release his lower garments. When they dropped she caressed his phallus.
“Kiss me. Do you understand what I mean?”
For a moment she did not. Then she looked up at him.
He flipped her over. “I am too far gone, anyway.” He made no more requests. He gave no instructions. He moved her as he pleased, until she knelt low with her hips high. He pushed up her garments again, until he exposed her bottom and legs.
He made her wait. He caressed her bottom. “It is hell that I want you so badly.” He pressed his erection between her thighs, but not in her. It touched and pressed that most sensitive spot. She gritted her teeth to try and control the shudder of need that screamed through her. “When you are dancing at the ball, remember how you feel right now, Eva. Remember the bastard who can make you weep with desire.”
He entered her, taunting her with his slowness. Again and again he tantalized her until she did weep, silencing the sounds with the bedclothes. Then gentleness disappeared and he took her harder than he ever had, until another release crashed through her in a cataclysm of howling sensations.
She collapsed on the bed. He did not. Sounds penetrated her stupor. She looked over to see him locking the door. He returned and sat on the bed.
“Damned boots,” he muttered. He pulled them off. He shed his shirt and trousers, then turned and unbuttoned her dress.
When they were both naked and lying side by side, he began the passion again.
* * *
Gareth rolled onto his back after the convulsive pleasure subsided. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Long shadows danced on the nearest wall. The light outside the windows showed dusk gathering to the east, but orange streaks enflamed the western sky. The window framed it all like a picture.
Beside him on her back, her head facing away, Eva watched too, as if she memorized it.
He turned onto
his stomach and threw his arm over her. She turned her head to him. Their noses almost touched.
“You made me seduce you again,” she said. “It doesn’t seem fair. You are supposed to seduce me.”
“I don’t break my promises, unless forced to, like today.”
“But you are supposed to be the bad one, not me. You are the one with the reputation.”
“Not as a rake. Not as a scoundrel.”
“No. As irresistible. I suppose I have proven that true once again.”
“Do not blame me if you know that you should not have what you want, and you decide to take what you want anyway.”
She turned her head, to look at the windows again. “It is pleasant lying like this. I suppose we cannot much longer.”
He was too comfortable to move. “Dinner is not for several hours.”
He began falling asleep, and dwelled on the cusp when she spoke again. “I am afraid a little about tomorrow night. I become more fretful with each passing hour. Even with that gown, I may not be suitable for such a fashionable assembly.”
She worried that she would not do. That reminded him of Whitmere’s assessment that indeed she would do.
“When you gaze in a looking glass, I do not know what you see, Eva. Not what I have seen since I almost knocked you down with my horse that day, that is obvious.”
“What did you see that day, besides an angry spinster standing in a puddle?”
“I saw a woman who knew herself, and who had the self-possession to scold a stranger. A lovely woman with changeable eyes. A brave lady, who did not lie to herself about the unladylike notions entering her head during that argument.”
“You were not supposed to notice the last part. I thought I was very good at hiding it.”
“Were my own thoughts not following the same path, you might have succeeded. But when two people share a sexual attraction that powerful that quickly, it is impossible to hide.”
She pressed her lips to his. “Also impossible to deny, it appears. It is very unfair that I must.”
In his mind, he began piecing together reassurance that he would not expect her to lapse again, but delicious rest seduced him into silence. That and the fact that he would be lying.
* * *
The even northern light, gray now and deepening fast, showed Gareth’s profile with heightened clarity. Subtle shadows formed, barely visible, that required the lightest touch with her chalk to imitate.
She sat in the chair she had moved to the side of the bed, down near its foot so she could challenge herself with a deeper perspective. Gareth lay on his stomach, his body uncovered, the arm that had embraced her still extended over the space where she had lain. Her sketchbook page showed his outline, and now she tried to make the figure real.
She studied his face long and hard, and with each moment she became less the artist and more the woman. She saw that face above her in her frenzy of pleasure, severe and sensual, not calm and almost soft like now. She saw it kind, with intimate humor in his eyes when he teased her.
She looked down and realized she had made no marks on the paper for some time. The light would fade soon, and she must wake him to leave. She finished the head, but not in detail. She drew efficiently so she had enough to call forth a memory of how beautiful he looked right now. Then she moved to his shoulders, trying hard to capture the complexity of anatomy there through highlights and shadows.
She had finished his shoulders and much of his back when the light became useless. She set her sketchbook and chalk on the table with the still life, and went to the bed. She touched his shoulder.
“You must go now. Dinner is in less than an hour.”
He sat up, wiped his eyes, and reached for his garments. Ten minutes later he appeared the same as when he had entered this chamber. Elegant. Confident. Devastating.
He would look the same tomorrow night, only better. She would enter that ball on his arm. His gift to her was a night to remember forever, and one that few women ever knew.
Only the memory that would never die was that of this moment, while she watched him fix his cuffs in the chamber’s shadows. She would never forget the emotion having its way with her.
Desire, he called it. Tempestuous and compelling, but still mere desire. Transitory. Not love the way the poets described. That was an illusion, invented to pretty up base lust.
Perhaps so. She lacked the experience to argue, or to contain and control it.
It was a cursed thing, the human heart. It knew no sense, no discipline. It led one to love what could destroy it, and did not know the difference between joy and pain.
* * *
The next morning, after learning nothing of interest in his conversation with Clifford, Gareth rode out to Ramsgate with Ives to talk to the owner of the transport company that had carried the pictures north. The man appeared honest enough, and Ives and he agreed that if something had gone wrong in transit, he was probably not involved.
Upon returning to the house in mid-afternoon, all was quiet. The preparations for the ball no doubt were under way. He doubted Eva would emerge from Sarah’s chambers until it was time for the coach.
His own preparations had to wait. Lance had left a summons for him with the butler. He went above and found Lance being groomed for the day. Another man sat in the dressing room, sipping wine and looking impatient. Gareth knew him. Viscount Demmiwood had been friends with Lance until he had married and given up his more reckless, rakish habits.
The intervening years had not been kind to the viscount. While Lance looked to be on the older side of young, Demmiwood appeared more the younger side of old. A paunch of contentment stretched his waistcoat. The fair curls tousling forward over his forehead did not hide a receding hairline.
Right now that forehead showed the pink tint and sheen of sweat that indicated the viscount experienced distress. He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs.
Lance interrupted his hated shave to greet Gareth. “You know Demmiwood. He has come to me with an extraordinary tale. I told him you and Ives should hear it, but the footman sent to Ives’s apartment came back saying he was not home.”
“We both went out of town. He should be back now. Send for him again.”
“I’ve no time for this,” Demmiwood said. “I have to prepare for the DeVere ball.”
“As does Gareth,” Lance said. “No time to waste, then. Tell him, Demmiwood.”
The viscount set down his wine. Gareth gave his attention.
“Two days ago, a picture seller who has been known at times to get his hands on excellent pictures, wrote and asked to call on me. He had something very special, he said. Very choice. Secretive, he was, as if he dared not be specific because others might get in before me if the details were made known. From his excitement, I guessed it would be a Gainsborough. I, like my father before me, am well known as a collector of his work. Finding ones that are not portraits is difficult, of course.”
“So you were interested.”
“Certainly. I may not have my father’s eye, but I am known as a connoisseur.”
Actually, Demmiwood was known as an easy mark. His willingness to pay good money for weak work was infamous. He had amassed one of the finest collections of second-rate art in England. Gareth had been tempted to unload the less satisfactory remnants of one of his brokered collections on him, but did not out of respect for Demmiwood’s old friendship with Lance.
“So I met with this man. He presented me with this.” Demmiwood reached down beside the divan on which he sat and lifted a small picture with a gilt plaster frame. “‘Gainsborough,’ he said. Normally I would have been delighted. However, with one look I knew all was not right.”
“It is forgery, that is certain. A very good one, but still a forgery.”
“I told you Gareth was good,” Lance said. “He spotted a problem from fifteen paces.”
“It is not only a forgery,” Demmiwood said, his agitation growing. “It is a copy. The original used to hang in th
e gallery of my estate. That is my father.” He pointed at one of the figures. “This is a portrait of him and his brothers when they were boys.”
Gareth went over, took the painting, and retreated to a window to examine it in the light.
“Hell of a thing,” Demmiwood said. “To be offered a forged copy of your own painting!”
“Did you accuse the picture seller of attempting fraud?”
“I did not. I swallowed my outrage, and asked him to leave it with me for a few days while I decided. I did not want to alert him that I knew his game and have him hop a packet.”
“I am grateful you did not alert him. You said this used to hang in your gallery—”
“Demmiwood’s county seat is in Sussex, of course,” Lance said, meaningfully. “Gareth knows all about the missing pictures, Demmiwood.”
“Then he may not be surprised that the original was among them. Packed up and shipped to safety, or so we all thought. Now, this.” His hand flourished at the picture in Gareth’s hands.
Gareth rubbed his thumb along the low corner. Still tacky. The painting had not been done long ago. More likely just months had passed.
Which meant whoever painted this had the original available very recently. It was the first mistake of whoever stole those pictures. With luck it would be all that was needed.
“When does this picture seller expect this back?”
“The painting or my money is expected tomorrow. I debated whether I could force him to tell me the whereabouts of the original, but after contemplating that, I doubted he would even admit to the crime, let along give information that might get him transported.”
Gareth set the picture down next to the divan again. “Give me his name, please. And leave this here for now, in case it is needed.”
Information in hand, Gareth went to his chamber and wrote a note to Ives informing him of the need to call on a picture seller in the morning. After that he read for two hours, until the manservant he was using at Langley House arrived to help him dress. At ten o’clock, he left his chamber, walked downstairs, and poured some sherry in a chamber that flanked the reception hall.
His Wicked Reputation Page 22